08/01/2015

It's been a while, hasn't it? We've been soaking up the sunshine and making the most of our Summer days here. Every time I walk past flowers, I feel the compulsion to pull out my phone and get a few shots for future drawing reference.The echinacea/purple coneflower that modeled for me was on a clearance table outside our local Home Depot a couple of weeks ago.

Here was my initial rough pencil sketch--very rough!

I used my Copic Warm Gray 0.1 Multiliner and inked over the penciled lines that I wanted to keep, and erased all of the pencil lines that I didn't need.

I started by rendering the petals--Copic Violets and Red Violet, as shown above.

Next I worked on my greens.

I worked on the flower centers here. I was happy with their roundedness, values, and color, but I still needed some highlights. Usually when I need to regain highlights, I resort to either my Copic colorless blender (if it's a small area that doesn't need a crisp white), or sometimes colored pencil if I do need a crisp shape.

For this piece, I tried a new-to-me tool, a Gold Kirarina Wink pen. You can see the gold metallic dots above. They are standing out a bit more than I needed, so after the gold ink was completely dry, I used my darker Copic colors (E49, RV99) to obscure the precise dots just a bit. (For more information on the Kirarina WiNK pens, look HERE.)

If I have any adult-coloring-book friends out there, here is a somewhat cleaned up .jpg file of my original purple coneflower artwork for your coloring pleasure: View this photo for gray lines, and View this photo for black lines.